On April 22, Brooke Thompson, Class of 2025, found herself 1,123 miles from campus on a ferry gazing into the ocean alongside a man she had never met. It was a breezy Tuesday morning, two days before her senior thesis presentation, three weeks before she marched through the alumnae arch, and her first day on set as a model for the Polo Ralph Lauren for Oak Bluffs collection.
“I was overjoyed about having the chance to participate,” Thompson said. “Representing Spelman in such an elegant way means the world to me.”
The collection features an assortment of pieces that masterfully blend Ralph Lauren’s Americana style and SpelHouse’s signature flair, all while paying homage to Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, a place where Black people from across the diaspora have traveled to for over a century. It is a clear demonstration of what is possible when artistry meets authenticity and cultural awareness is leveraged to create something personal and purposeful.
“The first thing that we knew for certain was that the first collection would not be a one-off,” James Jeter, Creative Director, Concept Design & Brand Direction for Polo Men’s at Ralph Lauren and Morehouse Class of 2013, said. “As we started to think about the first launch, we were thinking two, three, fives years ahead, and how we could continue to incorporate these stories across the Ralph Lauren canon.”
This is not the first time that this vision—one that exemplifies a clear interest in leveraging fantasy with the familiar—has been executed by James alongside collaborator Dara Douglas, Class of 2003 Product & Brand Lead for Design with Intent at Ralph Lauren. Once before, on March 15, 2022, the duo’s Polo Ralph Lauren Exclusively for Morehouse and Spelman Colleges’ Collection was released and almost instantly harnessed the kind of cultural conversation and embrace that has become harder and harder to secure as time has gone by. The collection instantly became an adored assortment of pieces that Spelhouse’s ever-stylish student and alumni community could adopt.
“In order to achieve that first collection we really combed through Spelman and Morehouse’s archives and got into the imagery and storytelling that exists in the materials there,” Douglas, said.
The collection also deftly creates a gilded connection between Ralph Lauren’s brand DNA and purpose—which promises “to inspire the dream of a better life through authenticity and timeless style”—and the legacies of Spelman and Morehouse Colleges.
“There’s a sense of sophistication that is just so intuitive at Spelman and Morehouse,” Chase Rumley, Class of 2027 and 2025 Fashion Scholarship Fund recipient, said. “I feel like that is something that could be said both about Ralph Lauren as a brand, and also Spelman and Morehouse colleges as institutions.”
Rumley remembers watching her parents, Spelman College ’98 and Morehouse College ’98, huddled together preparing for the collection to drop.
“They sat there, items selected, card information loaded, just buzzing,” Rumley said.
Their excitement was widely shared, which led the collection to swiftly sell out and its campaign to launch into the hearts and minds of past, current and future SpelHouse students.
“Seeing that your school is being shined on in such a great light by a company that’s so well known and so respected gave me so much pride,” Zoë Huey, Class of 2023 and Ralph Lauren Citizenship & Culture Associate said.
While the buzz surrounding the collection orchestrated a meaningful moment of appreciation and shared pride, it ultimately was not the guiding impetus for the Polo Ralph Lauren for Oak Bluffs collection.
“We knew we wanted to continue to integrate HBCU culture into the brand’s DNA,” Jeter said. “The goal was to find other similar safe spaces and safe havens, similar to Morehouse and Spelman, where there are beautiful stories of American culture and African American culture that feel untapped.”
Tucked into the northeastern shore of Martha’s Vineyard, Oak Bluffs has served as a space where generations of Black people have found safety and solace. Each summer, the island—with its slew of small businesses and sandy beaches—welcomes thousands of visitors per year. These individuals find peace in relishing the comfort of community, all while representing other safe spaces and organizations such as their respective HBCUs or Divine Nine organizations close to their hearts through clothing and events.
This distinct, concentrated abundance of Black joy on Oak Bluffs led Jeter and Douglas to investigate the space more and consider the safe space’s link to style.
The research began with the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art, before the duo turned to Martha’s Vineyard’s own art museum. They found an assortment of photos of families whose recreational legacies could be traced back frame by frame, year by year. However, after a certain point, they found that they had exhausted the resources and still were looking to complete their reference library.
At that moment, they decided that it was time for them to travel to Oak Bluffs themselves, and they spent time collecting anecdotes from families on the island.
One individual was Joyce Graves, a member of The Cottagers. The cottagers are a group of Black female homeowners founded in 1956 who are based in Oak Bluffs. Ralph Lauren partnered with The Cottagers and plans to support their restoration and philanthropic projects in honor of the collection.
Jeter and Douglas were allowed to page through Graves’ personal photo archive. The photos, taken by Graves’ father since the early 1900s, all possessed a similar lifelike feel. The man was a photojournalist and had a keen ability to transform even the most mundane, simple summer slices of life into truly meaningful confections that have been passed on among his descendants.
The duo peered over Graves’ dining room table and realized that here, with these pictures, and their ephemeral sense of ease, they found the beating heart of the campaign.
“We start from a real place at Ralph Lauren when we design,” Douglas said. “The images act as pure inspiration, we take design cues from what we see and it was incredibly important that we had raw images to inform the teams.”
A key photo that the team found themselves particularly struck by featured the blank house in a series of relatives that occupied it.
When it came time to shoot the collection on Martha’s Vineyard, it was late April, and the weeks surrounding the shoot were filled with rain and gusty winds. However, when the campaign’s team descended upon Oak Bluffs, conditions suddenly became reminiscent of the dreamy summer days that the crew, complete again with a representative group of creators and Nadine Ijewere who also shot the 2022 campaign, were trying to emulate.
As an incandescent glow gracefully swept itself from sea to shore, songs like Theophilus London and Tame Impala’s “Only You” bellowed from speakers, and hydrangeas danced in the wind.The moment turned into a kismet, cherished memory for the creatives on set.
“For some reason that week was just warm and sunny,” Jeter said. “It really did feel like some of the folks, maybe in that Shearer Cottage image, were with us. There was something just radiant that week on that island.”
Similar to the first collection, the Polo Ralph Lauren for Oak Bluffs collection featured a mix of professional models and other members of the Spelman and Morehouse community who had never modeled before.
“It was amazing talking to the other models and hearing about how special the experience was for them because they had never worked with this many Black models at once before,” Thompson said. “The energy on set was really so beautiful. It felt like we were making something beautiful.”
That energy translated into the campaign with ease. Each frame showcases the beauty not only of the collection and the clothes within it, but also of the traditions Oak Bluffs residents and visitors share during their special time in the sacred space.
This reflection of American history through the perspective of informed and invested individuals is the mission of Ralph Lauren’s Design With Intent team, one that digs into the richness of the country’s culture with a critical and curious lens.
“Our team is focusing on expanding the stories that we tell through authentic partnerships, and authentic collaborations, just to bring voice to some of the stories that perhaps are kind of at the margin and weren’t brought to the center,” Douglas said.
Three years after their original union, Spelman College, Morehouse College and Ralph Lauren have demonstrated the power of shared creativity.
“I really do think it is a match made in heaven,” David Flowers III, Morehouse Class of 2023 and Polo Ralph Lauren Purple Label assistant buyer, said. “To have three timeless entities collaborating and showing what happens when you remain consistent and stick to core brand and institutional tenets.”
On Aug. 8, “A Portrait of the American Dream: Oak Bluffs” will premiere at the African American Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival. The documentary, directed by Cole Brown, features the stories of individuals whose personal and familial legacies on Oak Bluffs contain an elegance and expansiveness singular to the special place.
“There’s something quite aspirational about spending time with family and friends in the summer,” Jeter said. “Something quite beautiful about the vineyard, you know, similar to Ralph Lauren products. It’s, it’s sort of worn, and there’s a ruggedness to it, but there’s still a beautiful, sort of timeless nature to the island and so it felt like there was a very beautiful symmetry.”
